Brendan Horan Avatar

You may recall this post

I asked the question what was that ugly mashed box was. Well matter of fact its an itanium2, Hp zx2000 workstation. Well was. I ended up buying this off ebay. Missing everything but case,motherboard,cpu and power supply.

Over the last few months I have been working on converting ugly box into a nice 4ru rack case. I brought an Antec 4ru case 4U22EPS650 it was cheep and met all the requirements.

To get the Itanium up and running i brought the flowing :

  • 4gb of ECC, registered DDR1 266mhz, 4x 1gb sticks
  • 1 ATI 7000 AGP video card
  • 2x LSI 1030 based cards (mine turned out to be dell's)
  • 5x 36gb SCA80 SCSi HDD's
  • 1x DDS4 tape drive
  • 1x 5in4 SCSi hot swap caddy
  • 1x 6x DVD-ROM/CD-Rom (more on this later)
  • 1x 8mb IDE flash drive

Specs of my Itanium are :

1.0ghz itanium 2 "deerfield" low power itanium You can find more at wiki HP zx200 motherboard  E-ATX, using zx1 chipset with PCI-x and AGP slots.

I brought two Dell LSI21320-IS PCI-X SCSI U320 cards. The reason for two is that the only have one SCSI channel each and given the way SCSI works I did not want to put a slow tape on the same bus as fast disks.

You can find the IA64 firmware from LSI. The Zx2000 only supports a very limited range of SCSI cards, as long as the chipset is an LSI 1030 your fine anything else forget about it, it will just beep and flash like crazy.

The reason for the ATI 7000, is its one of the only cards to meet the following two key items :

  1. Supports OpenVMS
  2. Works on a zx2000

The reason for the odd Optical drive is that OpenVMS install media that I have is VERY VERY VERY picky. To get OpenVMS to boot on the zx2000, You mush have the DVD-rom connected to IDE channel 1(hdd, not optical) using the HDD cable set as Master. Any other setting will fail. The zx2000 has two IDE channels labeled "optical" and "hdd". Make sure you plug the optical drive into the master port on the "HDD" channel. Also I had loads of issues with any form of DVD/RW combo drive. I used an old Apple 6x IDE DVD-rom/CD-Rom drive with no issues.

The 8mb IDE flash card is plugged into IDE socket 2 (Optical) and gives me space to load Firmware and EFI tools for pre-boot use. Its more then enough. Why so small ? Its all I need and was free..

The zx2000 was released by HP as a desktop. Lucky for me it comes with a wicked BMC, You can turn it on/off view the console, send TOC read logs and more. All via the serial port regardless of what state the machine is in! Also its VERY quite.

I currently have running on this machine :

  1. HP-UX 11.23
  2. OpenVMS 8.3-1H1
  3. Linux, Gentoo
  4. Windows 2008 R2 The fifth disk is currently spare.

You can find a full set of images on my flicker Hear is a quick teaser...

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